I'm rubbish at scrabble, so much so I hate it. It’s a game that relies on the player having a dictionary downloaded into their brain and be able to play the board. While everyone else is playing a triple word scored 'quantize' I'm adding a couple of letters to make 'pet'. The game of Qwirkle is different. You can feel the scrabble hereditary, but rather than literacy skills Qwirkle uses colours and shapes. Instead of adding letters together to make a word you're placing tiles down in a pattern to try and score the most points. You can't just point them anywhere; no you can’t play two tiles of the same colour or same shape in the same row. Points are scored based on how many rows you add your tiles to. If you manage to get all 6 different coloured tiles of the same shape in a row, or all six of the same colour you score a Qwirkle for double points.

It’s been one year since I posted my review of Munchkin, thereby kicking off Polyhedron Collider, and it’s been an odd year. This is my first attempt at writing a blog and although I haven’t achieved what I set out to do I have learnt a lot.

My aim was to create a table top games website similar to my favourite videogame sites. Websites such as rockpapershotgun, videogamer and eurogamer were my inspiration with their witty, yet informative writing and clean styles. It was a lofty aim for someone with no writing experience and little knowledge in creating websites but you don’t get experience by sitting on your backside thinking about it; you learn by doing it. Overall I think I've failed, mainly because I think my writing quality isn’t up to scratch and I think that it takes me such a long time for me to write a post that there isn’t enough content. So instead I’m going to pass on my some of the, hopefully useful, things I’ve learnt over the last twelve months.

Gaming isn't just about the new hotness, there are loads of great games out
there and just because it’s new it doesn't make it any better. I've already
looked at my favourite games of 2012 but to balance this I thought I'd look
at what games I actually played in 2012. I've been logging my plays all year on
Board Game Geek (yes, I
am that sad) and with a bit of spread sheet jiggery pokery and estimations of
play length I've come up with a definitive list of my most played games of the
year. And because no-one wants to play crap games these must be the best games
there are.